McDonald's paid to promote #McDStories — the internet sent its horror stories

In January 2012 McDonald's bought promoted Twitter campaigns to tell its food-quality story: first #MeetTheFarmers, then #McDStories, meant to collect heartwarming customer memories of the brand. Paid promotion put the hashtag in front of Twitter's most active users.

The audience rewrote the brief. Former employees and critics flooded the tag with horror stories about kitchens and ingredients, jokes and old grievances, and a companion tag, #McFail, grew up beside it to catalogue the fiasco. McDonald's killed the promotion fast — social media director Rick Wion said the company saw within an hour that it was not going as planned and changed course — and afterwards said it was 'learning from our experiences'.

McDonald's pointed to the raw counts in its defence: more than 72,000 mentions on the day, only a small share of them negative by its own tally. The numbers did not matter; the hijack was the story. #McDStories became the textbook 'bashtag' — a paid hashtag the public repossesses — and the case every social team cites before buying reach on an unmoderated tag.